Forest jobs are disappearing, too. Perhaps strategic alliances with tree-huggers can help

AMERICA'S most sparsely populated states were among its more resilient during the recession. Before the downturn, places like Montana and North Dakota poked along with slow growth and greying populations. When the wheels came off the national economy, they began to move up the rankings. They were doing well from commodities, had never known housing bubbles and were not especially vulnerable to the financial sector's troubles. In 2008 Montana's growth rate was the highest in the country.

But no state has escaped unscathed, and a good example of that is Montana's timber industry. A furious national rate of homebuilding kept lumber prices high at the beginning of the decade, but as the markets collapsed, so did housing starts. In 2008, according to the University of Montana's Bureau of Business and Economic Research, the state's overall sales of wood and paper products were roughly $710m, down from about $1.2bn in 2005.

Tom Power, an economist at the University of Montana, explains that the industry's problems predate the recession. North-western lumber mills have had a hard time competing with large Canadian operations since the passage of NAFTA. At the same time, mills in Montana and its neighbours are losing ground to suppliers in the warm, wet south-east, where trees grow up to five times as quickly.

State leaders, however, are loth to see wood-products jobs disappear. Jon Tester, Montana's junior Democratic senator, is promoting a Forest Jobs and Recreation Act that would mandate logging on 10,000 more acres of the state's national forests each year. It would also designate some 600,000 acres as new federal wilderness areas. The legislation represents a somewhat grudging compromise between conservationists and industry.

Such coalitions are not unusual in forests. When America first created forest reserves, more than a century ago, its goal was to create a sustainable supply of timber as well as to protect the woods and the fresh water reserves within them.

In some cases assuring supply is vital to conservation. The National Centre for Conservation Science and Policy is working on legislation that would allow logging in eastern Oregon's forests, which are largely filled with dry Ponderosa pines. Road-building, stock-grazing and fire suppression have disturbed the natural life cycle of the woods, which are now clogged with young growth. Restoring the forests, in this case, means getting loggers to thin out the trees. So in that neck of the woods, says the centre's spokesman, science and business interests are aligned.

In western Oregon's mature old-growth forests, however, preserving the forests means leaving them alone. As a result, environmentalists and industry have long been at loggerheads. In 1994, for example, Congress passed the Northwest Forest Plan, a measure that reduced logging on public lands partly in order to protect the northern spotted owl. That plan remains in place, despite efforts to chip away at it.

Mr Power explains that during the last timber downturn, during the 1980s, industry took the opportunity to retool. Mills were automated, for example, and shifted their focus to smaller lengths of lumber. In the years since, private timber companies have found it increasingly attractive to sell their land for conservation easements rather than chase the harvest or sell the land for private development. Conserving the forests may, in the end, prove easier than conserving the jobs.